by Jason Parent
Belgrade winced when he smiled as if the action was painful. “I’ve got a brother, Nicoli, who lives on a boat in Magadan. If you can get there and you can find him, tell him everything and that I said he’d help you. He owes me. Stay clear of the wildlife. The bears are bad, but the ticks are worse.” He shuddered.
Clara stifled a laugh. After all the man had just been through and yet needed to face, he was afraid of a tick. She stopped laughing when she saw the earnest worry written on his face.
“Life is going to be hard for you for a while, at least until this whole thing is over.” He smiled as best he knew how. “I wish you the best of luck.”
Clara started to cry. “Why are you doing this?”
Belgrade thought for a moment then said, “Because everyone deserves a chance at life. Too many lost that chance today under my protection. We’ve seen the infected and what happens to them. It’s possible it may be sleeping quietly in both of us right now and could wake up and turn us into mushroom-potato people or whatever, but I’m not about to kill myself, so what right do I have to kill you?”
You poor fool. She saw no benefit in announcing the fact that she was infected and had known so all along. Instead, she focused on the flower jutting out of his boot. “What’s that?” she asked, knowing full well what it was.
“Oh?” Belgrade looked where her finger was pointing. “I thought I had ripped all of these off me.” He pulled the flower from his boot and handed it to her. “This thing contains the virus…I think. You’re a scientist, right? I think it’s safe, not like those sticky bastards. You would make better use of it than I would.” He handed it out to her. “Please, take it. Use it to find a cure or destroy it or do whatever your bigger brain than mine thinks is best.”
Clara took the flower and inhaled its sweet perfume. That’s the second time in one day that a man has given me flowers. The lily was beautiful, she decided, and smiled. Capable of healing, of improving, of evolution. She tucked it delicately into her inner lab-coat pocket. “Thank you.”
Belgrade just nodded. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek. He blushed.
Then he unzipped his fly. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to give them a reason why my tracks lead over here.”
“Oh,” Clara said flatly, then, “Oh!” when she caught his meaning.
Belgrade reached into his pants as she turned and started to climb.
Epilogue
“Are these the bodies from the research center?” Bogdan asked. As the coroner for the Kasparov Medical Center in Sokol, he had no military background and no crematorium, though he understood the Russian Army had somehow brought one with them when it commandeered his wing of the hospital. His staff had been sent home, though he’d been ordered to stay for unspecified reasons.
“Yes,” a soldier in snow-camo fatigues said. “The general has ordered their immediate cremation. No autopsies are permitted. They are not to be touched.”
Bogdan stared at the ten bodies that had each been laid out in a body bag atop its own metal slab. He felt nothing. He was used to bodies. The soldiers worried him more. Just another day, I suppose.
“A representative from the CDC will be here shortly to oversee disposal,” the soldier said.
“CDC? As in the Americans?”
“Yes.” The soldier turned on his heel and left.
The CDC? What the hell were they playing with up there, and why were the Americans involved? He sneered. “Because they stick their noses in everything,” he muttered.
He shook his head. Stay out of it, Bogdan. You don’t want any part of this one.
One of the body bags twitched, the second of the lot closest to him. Bogdan watched it through narrowed eyes. If it had really been moving, it wasn’t any longer. The movement had been so slight that Bogdan thought he’d imagined it. When it twitched again, he cursed. “Goddamn rats. Oy. They tell me not to touch it. I’m not going to touch it.”
He sipped from a coffee then rested the mug and his buttocks on a desk near the entrance to the morgue. He watched the body bag for more signs of the vermin.
A small, white triangular blade poked a hole through the top of the bag. It looked like a dorsal fin cutting across a black sea as the bone-colored blade sliced through the material to about its midway mark.
Bogdan leaned closer. That is no rat. The blade worked quickly and deftly, and he watched it in a sort of amazed stupor. When one hand popped out of the slit, then a second, he nearly fell off the desk, shaking it so violently that his mug fell to the floor and shattered. Brown liquid formed a puddle at his feet.
His mouth hung open, and his thoughts went blank with fear. He couldn’t move or speak, couldn’t cry for help, his mind unable to process what was happening, unable to focus or find logic until it grasped and clung to a weak possibility.
A joke? Some kind of sick, demented joke? It had to be. The dead only rose in zombie movies.
But someone was rising. The hands separated the fabric, making room for a head to emerge. It belonged to a young woman, Indian he guessed, with long hair as black as raven feathers. Her shoulders appeared next as she sat up then scooted her torso completely out of the bag. She brought her knees to her chest then pulled her feet up and out. She threw a leg over the side of the slab and stood.
Bogdan stared, still speechless, at a lovely, alive, aware, and as far as he could tell, completely unharmed woman. Her clothes were riddled with holes and stained with blood, but he could see no injuries beneath them.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “How did you get in here?”
“Getting in here was easy,” the woman said, smiling and speaking perfect Russian. “As for my name, you can call me Molli.”
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Kenneth Parent and Kimberly Yerina for their beta-reads, as well as my editors and publicist, whose help have been invaluable here and elsewhere. I’d also like to thank Don D’Auria, Mike Valsted, and the entire Flame Tree team for their belief in my work and for turning the words of many a fine author into something beautiful.
About this book
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Text copyright © 2020 Jason Parent
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FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB 978-1-78758-355-9 | PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-353-5
UK-PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-354-2 | ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-356-6
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